OWC Envoy SSD

I’m old enough to remember being impressed when they first put games on cartridges. Whole games! Later, this evolved in to memory cards for saves that you bought for your PS1 games that had a massive capacity of 128kB! You kept them in little plastic cases and if you get 4 of them and stack them in 2 piles of 2 next to each other, you get an approximate idea of the physical size of this external disc drive from OWC. That can hold up to 1 Terrabyte of information. So, for context, this drive can hold approximately 1/5 of all the PS1 games ever made – the catalogue stretched to almost 8000 titles – in the same amount of physical space as 60 game saves on the PS1.

Lovely if you’re a retro gamer and handy to give you an idea of how much you can store on this device if you’re new to external hard drives but what about the rest of you? Well, let’s get technical. The transfer rate can be as high as 10 Gb/s if using a system that supports this speed and the port itself is a USB-C (3.2) that is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and 3.0. It comes with its storage compatibility automatically configured for Apple devices going as far back as iPadOS13 but a quick re-format for your PC is a simple thing to do so this is no biggy. It’s also compatible with Linux and any MacOS released in the last 10 years. In other words, you can pretty much use this thing on any device made since 2014 (you’ll need a separate USB-C to USB-A converter for some devices) and it will work. It’s BUS powered so there’s no need for an external power source and you don’t even need a driver to make it work.

It comes in an aircraft-grade aluminium casing and weighs less than 45 grams and, a personal favourite of mine, it makes no noise itself. The capacity and ease of use you get for the price makes this an affordable data storage option for every day use and you can carry it around in your pocket. Not many external hard drives can boast that!RRP $149.99

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